A couple of weeks ago I attended a lecture by Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff-writer and author of the New York Times’ Bestseller, The Sixth Extinction. For an hour and a half, she outlined our world’s mounting crises of climate change, ocean acidification, and invasive species. So many of us arrived to hear the undeniably bad news that they scrambled to fill the halls outside of the auditorium with extra seats.

A few weeks later, I attended a lecture by journalist Naomi Klein, recent author of This Changes Everything, a journalistic exploration of climate change and capitalism. At the end of her lecture, she stated that she thought climate change was a spiritual crisis. Al Gore had expressed a similar sentiment when he received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, saying, “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”